Judge strikes down part of Patriot Act

A federal judge in New York Thursday slapped down parts of the controversial USA Patriot Act and criticized Congress for abandoning its role of oversight, saying when “the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of privacy.”

The ruling is a victory for the American Civil Liberties Union and an Internet service provider that challenged an FBI-issued National Security Letter that allows the government to gain access to personal records without court oversight.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, however, stayed his ruling and gave the government time to appeal. It’s not the first time the Bush Administration has lost a court case over its abuse of powers and invasion on the rights of Americans and the White House has always appealed. Even when the final decision goes against the Administration, Bush usually ignores the courts and continues to ignore the Constitution and the law.

Reports The Associated Press:

The ACLU had challenged the law on behalf of an Internet service provider, complaining that the law allowed the FBI to demand records without the kind of court supervision required for other government searches. Under the law, investigators can issue so-called national security letters to entities like Internet service providers and phone companies and demand customers’ phone and Internet records.

In his ruling, Marrero said much more was at stake than questions about the national security letters.

He said Congress, in the original USA Patriot Act and less so in a 2005 revision, had essentially tried to legislate how the judiciary must review challenges to the law. If done to other bills, they ultimately could all “be styled to make the validation of the law foolproof.”

Noting that the courthouse where he resides is several blocks from the fallen World Trade Center, the judge said the Constitution was designed so that the dangers of any given moment could never justify discarding fundamental individual liberties.

He said when “the judiciary lowers its guard on the Constitution, it opens the door to far-reaching invasions of liberty.”

Regarding the national security letters, he said, Congress crossed its boundaries so dramatically that to let the law stand might turn an innocent legislative step into “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

He said the ruling does not mean the FBI must obtain the approval of a court prior to ordering records be turned over, but rather must justify to a court the need for secrecy if the orders will last longer than a reasonable and brief period of time.

A March government report showed that the FBI issued about 8,500 national security letter, or NSL, requests in 2000, the year prior to passage of the USA Patriot Act. By 2003, the number of requests had risen to 39,000 and to 56,000 in 2004 before falling to 47,000 in 2005. The overwhelming majority of the requests sought telephone billing records information, telephone or e-mail subscriber information or electronic communication transactional records.

The judge said that through the NSLs, the government can unmask the identity of Internet users engaged in anonymous speech in online discussions, can obtain an itemized list of all e-mails sent and received by someone and can then seek information on those communicating with the individual.

“It may even be able to discover the web sites an individual has visited and queries submitted to search engines,” the judge said.

Marrero’s lengthy judicial opinion, akin to an eighth-grade civics lesson, described why the framers of the Constitution created three separate but equal branches of government and delegated to the judiciary to say what the law is and to protect the Constitution and the rights it gives citizens.

Marrero said the constitutional barriers against governmental abuse “may eventually collapse, with consequential diminution of the judiciary’s function, and hence potential dire effects to individual freedoms.”

In that event, he said, the judiciary could become “a mere mouthpiece of the legislature.”

Marrero had ruled in 2004, on the initial version of the Patriot Act, that the letters violate the Constitution because they amounted to unreasonable search and seizure. He found free-speech violations in the nondisclosure requirement, which for example, disallowed an Internet service provider from telling customers their records were being turned over to the government.

After he ruled, Congress revised the Patriot Act in 2005, and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals directed that Marrero review the law’s constitutionality a second time.

Another reason I am a member of the ACLU. People may get mad at them for making county offices take down mangers on public property, but in the end, they’ve been the ONLY voice against the trashing of the constitution by this most corrupt administration. A few manger scenes in storage are a small price to pay for my constitutional freedoms.
Donnat

It does no good for the people to use the courts because Bush is above the law. He does as he pleases regardless of subpoenas, court orders, what have you? And he smirks at us. “Whaddya gonna do about it?” The founding fathers saw this coming, so they wrote the second amendment.